100%: the Story of a Patriot eBook

To begin at the beginning: the “Goober
case” parallels in its main outlines the case
of Tom Mooney. If you wish to know about this
case, send fifteen cents to the Mooney Defense Committee,
Post Office Box 894, San Francisco, for the pamphlet,
“Shall Mooney Hang,” by Robert Minor.
The business men of San Francisco raised a million
dollars to save the city from union labor, and the
Mooney case was the way they did it. It happened,
however, that the judge before whom Mooney was convicted
weakened, and wrote to the Attorney-General of the
State to the effect that he had become convinced that
Mooney was convicted by perjured testimony. But
meantime Mooney was in jail, and is there still.
Fremont Older, editor of the San Francisco “Call,”
who has been conducting an investigation into this
case, has recently written to the author: “Altogether,
it is the most amazing story I have ever had anything
to do with. When all is known that I think can
be known, it will be shown clearly that the State
before an open-eyed community was able to murder a
man with the instruments that the people have provided
for bringing about justice. There isn’t
a scrap of testimony in either of the Mooney or Billings
cases that wasn’t perjured, except that of the
man who drew the blue prints of Market Street.”

To what extent has the detection and punishment of
radicalism in America passed out of the hands of public
authorities and into the hands of “Big Business?”
Any business man will of course agree that when “Big
Business” has interests to protect, it must and
will protect them. So far as possible it will
make use of the public authorities; but when thru
corruption or fear of politics these fail, “Big
Business” has to act for itself. In the
Colorado coal strike the coal companies raised the
money to pay the state militia, and recruited new
companies of militia from their private detectives.
The Reds called this “Government by Gunmen,”
and the writer in his muckraking days wrote a novel
about it, “King Coal.” The man who
directed the militia during this coal strike was A.
C. Felts of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, who
was killed just the other day while governing several
coal counties in West Virginia.

You will find this condition in the lumber country
of Washington and Oregon, in the oil country of Oklahoma
and Kansas, in the copper country of Michigan, Montana
and Arizona, and in all the big coal districts.
In the steel country of Western Pennsylvania you will
find that all the local authorities are officials of
the steel companies. If you go to Bristol, R.
I., you will find that the National India Rubber Company
has agreed to pay the salaries of two-thirds of the
town’s police force.